In an information centric world, a typical manager or executive spends a substantial amount of time researching business information or filtering through such information. As a particular example, an individual can easily access vast amounts of data to summarize past business activity and to inform future business practice (e.g., by way of the Internet), but filtering irrelevant data to uncover pertinent ‘nuggets’ of information can be a time consuming task. The executive can utilize a search engine to refine and qualify a data search, but interaction with the search engine is still a manual procedure.
Businesses typically summarize economic progress, including marketing and sales information, overhead costs, human resource statistics, general budget information, and various related information in executive reports. Some reports can be periodic, providing a snapshot of relevant data at various points in time (e.g., daily, weekly, monthly, etc.) To a manager or executive, such reports can be a critical mechanism for planning future activity. For instance, budgets are often planned based on projected sales reports, overhead cost evaluations, or the like, indicating potential future revenues. Travel can be organized around a need to interface with clients, customers, suppliers, and so on, indicated by feedback from such entities. Furthermore, future business opportunities, and expenses incurred in fostering them, can depend on fluctuation in national or regional markets, understanding demands of particular organizations, correctly interpreting international politics, and so on; understanding these factors is based heavily on having sufficient and appropriate information. As a result, an ability to develop successful management strategies can depend on the quality and appropriateness of information contained in these executive reports.
Although summarizing business information is an age-old concept, room for improvement remains in terms of personalizing such information. Executives or their assistants typically must sort through a report in order to find information pertinent to a particular need, especially if such a report aggregates information for multiple aspects of a business (e.g., new product studies, supplier evaluations, engineering reports, and quality control information). Consequently, there is room for improvement in personalizing executive reporting for individual aspects of a business.